World Cup Prediction League

Ok so clearly there's no interest in a Fantasy World Cup game, but is anyone interested in a prediction league? Much easier game and requires less time and thought.

For those not familiar, basically you predict the score of each game (for knockout games it's always the 90 minute score, don't worry about extra time and penalties), and you get points for getting it exactly right, or getting the correct winner/draw, or the correct number of goals for a team (ie, predict 1-0 and it's 1-1, you will still get points for rightly predicting the 1 goal).

So it doesn't take as much thought and effort as picking fantasy teams. I think it was for the 98 world cup when one of the guys in the league I was in put 1-0 for every single game and ended up finishing quite highly.

Is anyone interested? Let me know asap and I'll set up a league if there's a few people.

Need something to do online that stops me reading all the transfer rumours about players we are not going to sign! Joe Cole FFS. The guys on the Arsenal forum are actually convinced we're going to pay him 110K a week and sign him.

It's actually not that ludicrous a wage in this instance as there is no transfer fee. It's a ridiculous wage if you're paying big money for the transfer aswell. But for most clubs (for the likes of Man City and Chelsea it's not an issue as they don't have transfer budgets), the "transfer budget" is not just for transfer fees, but also includes the funds available for the wages of new signings.

So when a player is free, he can get a much higher wage/signing on fee due to the absence of a transfer fee. 110K a week works out to 5.72m a year. So basically it's like buying him for 5.72m of this year's transfer budget, which IMO is a great piece of business. If he signs a 4 year contract it's a total of 22.88m spread over 4 years, which if he had a couple of years left on a contract is probably not too far above the sort of transfer fee he could command from an English club as an England World Cup player, and probably the most technically skillful English player of his generation and still under 30. Especially once City get involved. And then you'd have the 80K a week wage (or whatever he gets at Chelsea) on top of that.

He's on a different planet to any other option we have on the right wing, and considering Gallas, Campbell, Sylvestre and Senderos are all leaving and Merida has already left, that's got to be 200K a week off our wage bill (and 300K a week off plus 40m or so more to the transfer budget when Cesc leaves) plus most of the transfer budget will still be available for a number 1 keeper, starting central defender and backup defensive mid still desparately needed. This is a deal Wenger would be absolutely out of his mind not to make.

But I'm breaking my own cardinal rule and allowing myself to hope about a ridiculous transfer rumour! Back to the prediction game, anyone else interested? I'll set it up tonight.

The league still has to be "approved" apparently so I will PM the password once it is.

Fairly simple game. Predict the scores and you get:2 points for the correct result (correct winner or draw - ie, predict 1-0 and it's 2-1)1 point for correct number of goals (ie, predict 1-0 and it's 1-1 you get 1 point for predicting team A's 1 goal corect)5 points for the correct score (ie, predict 2-0 and it ends 2-0)For each round of matches you also get a "banker." Choose one match you feel certain about and you extra points for it.